by Richard Lederer Please explore my Web site at http://www.verbivore.com
I recently took my three granddaughters to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where we attended "Frequent Flyers," the famous bird show. I am not only a word botcher; I am a bird watcher, and our family enjoyed various species strutting their stuff on the ground, hawks swooping down from the sky, and a gray parrot emitting all sorts of sound effects.
In their narrative, of the Wild Animal Park's trainers kept pronouncing the name of the San Diego Zoological Society as ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul society. After the performance, I mentioned to the two young women in private that there are two, not three, o's in zoological so the proper sounding is ZOH-uh-LAHJ-i-kul. They told me they knew that but had been instructed by their bosses to say ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul because people wouldn't understand the proper pronunciation.
That kind of dumbing down is almost as bad as a highly placed politician being told by his advisers that he will get more votes if he says NOO-kyuh-lur, rather than the correct NOO-klee-ur.
* * *
Doublespeak is grossly euphemistic language in the public sector that is dishonest, misleading, and inhumane. Doublespeak doesn't call a spade a space but rather "a manual excavation device." Early this year, Spirit Airlines, the company that brought us a $25 charge for each piece of luggage taken onto their planes now boasts "pre-reclined seats." "Pre-reclined" is blatant doublespeak for "can't be adjusted."
* * *
America loves language vagaries: We ship by truck and send cargo by ship. Our nose can run and our feet can smell. We drive in a parkway and park in a driveway.
The saga of Tiger Woods has added a more intricate switcheroo: He who drives well on a fairway may not fare well on a driveway.
* * *
Perhaps because of the reduced ingestion of performance-enhancing drugs, the 2010 baseball season was memorable for the number of no-hit games. But the most dramatic contest of the season was the June 2 "imperfect game" pitched by Detroit Tigers hurler Armando Galarraga.
In that game Galarraga had thrown a perfect game until the last batter, when umpire Jim Joyce called a runner safe when he was really out by a full step. Coincidentally, Jim Joyce has the same name as Ulysses writer James Joyce, a man with famously poor eyesight. As his vision failed, author James Joyce took to wearing a milkman’s uniform when he wrote, believing that its whiteness caught the sunlight and reflected it onto his pages.
Maybe umpire Jim Joyce should have donned a milkman's uniform to that fateful baseball game.
* * *
In a recent survey, Maxim magazine asked women what they find to be the biggest turnoffs in men's e-mails and text messages. The results:
smiley faces/emoticons 8.2%
excessive exclamation points 18.7%
inappropriate jokes 24.8%
sexual requests 24.8%
nothing 33.6%
spelling and grammar errors 44.4%
So, guys. Brush up your grammar and you'll score big online.
* * *
A newspaper for the New Richmond Car Buffs listed the areas of interest at an upcoming car show: "Rod's, Classic's, Antique's, Dash Plaque's, Spectator's, and All Make's Car's and Truck's.
The location of the event: "Bernards, New Richmond." They omitted the apostrophe in the only word that actually needed one!
It's a jungle out there, a real zoo. So here's a collection of beastly wisdom that may help you survive in a dog-eat-dog world that depends on survival of the fittest:
• Be like a turtle. You'll make progress by coming out of your shell and sticking your neck out.
• Speaking of sticking your neck out, be like a giraffe. Reach higher than all the others, and you'll have the best perspective on life. You'll be head and shoulders above the general herd, and everybody will then look up to you.
• Be like the birds. They have bills, too, but they keep on singing.
• Be like a duck. Keep calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddle like crazy underneath.• Be like a beaver. Don’t get stumped. Just cut things down to size and build one dammed thing after another for the future.
• Be like a cat. Claw your way to the top. That's what drapes are for.
• Be like a dog. Be loyal. Enjoy the wind in your face. Run barefoot, romp, and play daily. Leave yourself breathless at least once a day. Chase your tail in an effort to make ends meet. And be sure to leave your mark on the world.
• Be like a chicken. Act like a smart cluck, rule the roost, and suck seed.
• Be like a horse. Use some horse sense and stable thinking and be able to say "nay."
• Be like an owl. Look all around, be wise, and give a hoot.
• Be like a lion. Live life with pride and grab the lion's share with might and mane.
• Be like a rhino. Be thick-skinned and charge ahead to make your point.
• Be like an oyster. It takes a lot of grit to make a pearl of great value.
• Be like a sponge. Soak up everything, and be helpful in the kitchen.
• Be like a spider. Surf the web and all the right strings.
• Be like a squirrel. Go out on a limb to prepare for hard times.
• Be like a kangaroo. Advance through life by leaps and bounds, and keep your family close to you.
• Be like a frog. Be comfortable on land and water—and if something bugs you, snap it up.
• Be like a mole. You know you're living on burrowed time, so stay down-to-earth and well-grounded. Forge ahead by digging as deep as you can.
• Be like a flamingo. Don't be afraid of looking odd, as long as you have a leg to stand on.
• Be like the woodpecker. Just keep pecking away until you finish the job. You’ll succeed by using your head and proving that opportunity knocks more than once.• Don't be like a lemming. Avoid following the crowd and jumping to conclusions.
• And remember that the only things you find in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
Not long ago, I was one of about sixty people who performed in a "Celebrity Sonnets" program at the Avo Theater in Vista. I explained the meter and imagery of Sonnets 73 and 138, while my friend Tiffany Moon took a musical approach, offering a dark interpretation of Sonnet 8 against the Baltic folk harp in g minor. She was joined by two of her Institute of Arts and Letters students: Nine-year-old Lilith Irvin played Greensleeves on the harpsichord as an accompaniment to a reading of Sonnet 128 by Ved Joshi, who is all of six years old!
At least half of the performers that luminous evening were students, which prompts me to share with you my lifetime collection of fluffs and flubs, goofs and gaffes, blunders botches, boo-boos and bloopers miscreated by students across our fair land. Because Shakespeare's works have been widely read in schools for centuries, in their assigned essays, many generations of young scholars have gone from bard to verse. Here is a string of the brightest uncut and unpolished student gems:
Shakespeare never made much money and is famous only because
of his plays and sonics. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing hysterectomies,
tragedies, comedies, and errors. I don't see why he is so popular when his writing
skills are so low. He wrote in Islamic pentameter, and you can't hardly understand
what he is saying.
In one of Shakespeare's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving
himself in a long soliloquy. A soliloquy is a conversation between one person.
Hamlet has an edible complex, and his mind is filled with the filth of incestuous
sheets which he pours over every time he sees his mother. Oedipus and Hamlet
really had a lot in common, even if Freud had not yet been invented.
Hamlet decides to act madly so he gets in an antic position. In Act Five Hamlet
talks to Horatio about a skull that has been thrown up. Act Five comes right
after Act Four.
In another play, Macbeth was from his mother's womb untamely ripped. He is a
brave and strong man who turns bad and gradually gets worse. After Macbeth becomes
the Thane of Candor, King Duncan wires Macbeth that he will be spending the
night at his castle. Then Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill King
Duncan by attacking his manhood. All Macbeth does is follow his wife's odors.
He kills the king on page 14. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth then suffer from quilt.
In fact, they have so much quilt between them, they can't sleep at night.
During the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth is afraid her husband will expose himself
in front of his guests. Then Lady Macbeth gets kilt. The proof that the witches
in Macbeth were supernatural is that no one could eat what they cooked.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. This story presents
a one on one situation between a man and a woman. Romeo and Juliet belonged
to the families of the Montages and Copulates, and Lady Copulate disliked Romeo.
Romeo saw Juliet for the first time at the massacred ball. They tell each other
how much they are in love in the baloney scene. After much fighting in the pubic
square, Romeo's last wish is to be laid by Juliet. When Juliet died, they had
a funeral in her wedding dress.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus is a tragic hero despite dying at the end.
In Julius Caesar, the toothslayer warned Caesar to beware the March
of Dimes. He is murdered by the Ides of March because they think he is ego-testical.
Dying, he gasps out the words “Eat you, Brutus!”
Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey
Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise
Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
My son Howard and daughter Annie are full-time professional poker players who live and move and have their beings in that windowless, clockless pleasure dome known as Las Vegas. It’s an easy life – earning thousands of dollars in a single night just sitting around playing card games. But it’s a hard-knock life, too, what with the long, sedentary hours; the addictive behavior and secondhand smoke that suffuse the poker rooms; and the times when Lady Luck goes out whoring and your pocketbook and ego get mugged.
How best to catch and crystallize this collide-o-scopic life my children lead, this life of gorgeous poker rooms and hearts of darkness, of Euclidean clarity and survival of the meanest? Bob “Silver Eagle” Thompson, once tournament director of the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe casino, said it best: “Poker is a tough way to make an easy living.”
That’s a paradox, a statement that seems absurd or self-contradictory
but that turns out to be true. The word paradox derives from para, “against,”
and doxos, “opinion.” In its Greek form the word meant “not
what you’d expect to be true.”
Paradox is a particularly powerful device to ensnare truth because it concisely
tells us something that we did not know we knew. It engages our hearts and minds
because, beyond its figurative employment, paradox has always been at the center
of the human condition. “Man’s real life,” wrote Carl Jung,
“consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night,
birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. If it were not so, existence
would come to an end.”
Paradox was a fact of life long before it became a literary and rhetorical device. Who among us has not experienced something ugly in everything beautiful, something true in everything false, something female in something male, or, as King Claudius says in Shakespeare's Hamlet, “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage”? Who among us is not captured by and captured in Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man”?:
Placed on the isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge on the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.
In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
As I–glory, jest, and riddle--finish cobbling this column, I suffer a little death. Something has ended, winked out, never to be begun, shaped, or completed again. But now that I’m done, I think of the poet John Donne, who, almost four centuries ago, chanted the paradoxology of our lives: “Death, thou shalt die.”
Now that I’m done, I am a little bit immortal, too, because I know that you, in another place and another time, are passing your eyes over these words and sharing my thoughts and emotions long after I have struck the symbols on my keyboard, perhaps even after I have slipped this mortal coil.
The earliest tributes to mothers
date back to the annual spring festival the Greeks dedicated to Rhea, the mother
of many deities, and to the offerings ancient Romans made to their Great Mother
of Gods, Cybele. Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday in
Lent in honor of Mary, mother of Christ. In England this holiday was expanded
to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.
In the United States, Mother's Day started nearly 150 years ago, when Anna Jarvis,
an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health
conditions in her community, a cause she believed would be best advocated by
mothers. She called it Mother's Work Day.
Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist and
author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized
a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace, since she believed they bore the
loss of human life more harshly than anyone else.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother's Day a national holiday to be
celebrated each year on the second Sunday of May. In honor of this apparent
day, let’s celebrate some words that have one thing in common. They all
end with the letters MA, an affectionate shortening of mother. From each definition,
identify each word whose ending is brought up by MA.
Example: American president: Obama.
Hint: the words occur in alphabetical order.
I’ll avoid all those generally unpleasant medical terms, such as asthma,
carcinoma, coma, eczema,edema, emphysema, enema, glaucoma, hematoma, melanoma,
plasma, sarcoma, and trauma.
Answers repose at the end of the game.
1. a person or thing despised or cursed
2. a pleasant odor
3. according to Hinduism, the essence from which all life originates
4. an unusual ability to influence people and arouse devotion
5. motion pictures
6. a punctuation mark
7. a problem that requires a choice between equally undesirable
solutions
8. what you get at graduation
9. a system of principles or doctrines
10. the chief monetary unit of Greece
11. a play
12. something that is ambiguous or puzzling
13. in Hinduism and Buddhism, the principle that one's actions determine one's
future in this life or in other incarnations
14. a priest who adheres to the form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and Mongolia
15. woolly-haired mammal of South America
16. what Gandhi was
17. a full, wide view of an extensive area
18. a large wild American cat; mountain lion; cougar
19. a long-lasting mark or stain on one's character or reputation
20. solid earth
Special challenges: Name two American states that end in MA. Name the
third and 18th letters of the Greek alphabet.
Answers
1. anathema 2. aroma 3. Brahma 4. charisma 5.
cinema 6. comma 7. dilemma 8. diploma 9. dogma 10. drachma
11. drama 12. enigma 13. karma (Watch out, or my karma will run over your dogma!)
14. lama 15. llama 16. mahatma 17. panorama 18. puma 19. stigma 20. terra firma
Special challenges: Alabama and Oklahoma; gamma and sigma
The smashing success of the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp film Alice in Wonderland is vivid evidence of our fascination with Lewis Carroll's work for almost a century and a half. Alexander Woollcott wrote, "Not Tiny Tim, nor Falstaff, nor Rip Van Winkle, nor any other character wrought in the English tongue seems now a more permanent part of that tongue's heritage than do the high-handed Humpty Dumpty, the wistful Mad Hatter, the somewhat arbitrary Queen of Hearts, the evasive Cheshire Cat, and the gently pathetic White Knight."
Why, we may ask, does the work of this girl-doting bachelor
exert such a powerful hold on our collective imagination?
Although analyzing Lewis Carroll's fantasies is like trying to dissect a soap
bubble, surely one source of their enduring appeal to children of all ages is
their special sense of wonder about language. Carroll showed a particular aptitude
for making up blends by merging two words and beheading parts of one or both.
He called these inventions portmanteau words because he loved to scrunch two
words into one as clothes are crammed into a portmanteau, or traveling bag.
The most famous example of Lewis Carroll's facile gift for blending is his "Jabberwocky"
poem, which begins:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the word slithy, he answers: "Well slithy means 'lithe and slimy.' You see, it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings packed into one word." Dumpty later interprets mimsy: "Well, then, mimsy is 'flimsy and miserable' (there's another portmanteau for you)." Two words that appear later in "Jabberwocky" have become enshrined in dictionaries of the English language -- chortle ("chuckle" + "snort") and galumph ("gallop" + "triumph"). When we today eat Frogurt, drink Cranapple juice and Fruitopia, and chew Dynamints, we are sharing Lewis Carroll's ginormous delight with portmanteau words.